Indoor Philosophy

Indoor Philosophy:

Edward Abbey famously slammed a whole school of metaphysics using a phrase I think he had from Muir himself. Muir used the phrase "indoor philosophy" to explain why Bostonians in the company of Emerson refused to let the old man join in one of Muir's wild treks.

He seemed as serene as a sequoia, his head in the empyrean; and forgetting his age, plans, duties, ties of every sort, I proposed an immeasurable camping trip back in the heart of the mountains. He seemed anxious to go, but considerately mentioned his party. I said: "Never mind. The mountains are calling; run away, and let plans and parties and dragging lowland duties all gang tapsal-teerie. We'll go up a cañon singing your own song, "Good-by, proud world! I'm going home, in divine earnest. Up there lies a new heaven and a new earth; let us go to the show." But alas, it was too late,—too near the sundown of his life. The shadows were growing long, and he leaned on his friends. His party, full of indoor philosophy, failed to see the natural beauty and fullness of promise of my wild plan, and laughed at it in good-natured ignorance, as if it were necessarily amusing to imagine that Boston people might be led to accept Sierra manifestations of God at the price of rough camping.

Abbey took the phrase and used it as a weapon. "In metaphysics, the notion that earth and all that's on it is a mental construct is the product of people who spend their lives inside rooms," he said. "It is an indoor philosophy."

I find that I have the same complaint with Stephen Pinker's latest, "The Mystery of Consciousness." This is a fascinating piece, as it should be since it treats a fascinating problem. What is the nature of consciousness?

I'd like you to read his article in full, but I want to treat a couple of parts of it. First, the scientific data he advances to us is full of import. The advances in our understanding of the working of the brain are astonishing at times, and something I greatly enjoy thinking about. His explanation of how people are less rational than they think they are, or even than they seem to be, is I think one of the most useful lessons to be learned about Mankind.

When an experimenter got people to endure electric shocks in a sham experiment on learning, those who were given a good rationale ("It will help scientists understand learning") rated the shocks as more painful than the ones given a feeble rationale ("We're curious.") Presumably, it's because the second group would have felt foolish to have suffered for no good reason. Yet when these people were asked why they agreed to be shocked, they offered bogus reasons of their own in all sincerity, like "I used to mess around with radios and got used to electric shocks."

There is a lot to be said for his work on "the Easy Problem," as he calls it. What I want to point to is what he has to say about "the Hard Problem."

The Hard Problem, on the other hand, is why it feels like something to have a conscious process going on in one's head--why there is first-person, subjective experience. Not only does a green thing look different from a red thing, remind us of other green things and inspire us to say, "That's green" (the Easy Problem), but it also actually looks green: it produces an experience of sheer greenness that isn't reducible to anything else. As Louis Armstrong said in response to a request to define jazz, "When you got to ask what it is, you never get to know."

The Hard Problem is explaining how subjective experience arises from neural computation. The problem is hard because no one knows what a solution might look like or even whether it is a genuine scientific problem in the first place. And not surprisingly, everyone agrees that the hard problem (if it is a problem) remains a mystery.

He says this early in the piece, but then goes a long time before he explains what he means by 'not a genuine scientific problem in the first place.' What he means is that it may not be possible to approach the problem through science.

TO APPRECIATE THE HARDNESS OF THE HARD PROBLEM, CONSIDER how you could ever know whether you see colors the same way that I do. Sure, you and I both call grass green, but perhaps you see grass as having the color that I would describe, if I were in your shoes, as purple. Or ponder whether there could be a true zombie--a being who acts just like you or me but in whom there is no self actually feeling anything. This was the crux of a Star Trek plot in which officials wanted to reverse-engineer Lieut. Commander Data, and a furious debate erupted as to whether this was merely dismantling a machine or snuffing out a sentient life.

No one knows what to do with the Hard Problem. Some people may see it as an opening to sneak the soul back in, but this just relabels the mystery of "consciousness" as the mystery of "the soul"--a word game that provides no insight.

Many philosophers, like Daniel Dennett, deny that the Hard Problem exists at all. Speculating about zombies and inverted colors is a waste of time, they say, because nothing could ever settle the issue one way or another. Anything you could do to understand consciousness--like finding out what wavelengths make people see green or how similar they say it is to blue, or what emotions they associate with it--boils down to information processing in the brain and thus gets sucked back into the Easy Problem, leaving nothing else to explain. Most people react to this argument with incredulity because it seems to deny the ultimate undeniable fact: our own experience.

The most popular attitude to the Hard Problem among neuroscientists is that it remains unsolved for now but will eventually succumb to research that chips away at the Easy Problem. Others are skeptical about this cheery optimism because none of the inroads into the Easy Problem brings a solution to the Hard Problem even a bit closer. Identifying awareness with brain physiology, they say, is a kind of "meat chauvinism" that would dogmatically deny consciousness to Lieut. Commander Data just because he doesn't have the soft tissue of a human brain. Identifying it with information processing would go too far in the other direction and grant a simple consciousness to thermostats and calculators--a leap that most people find hard to stomach. Some mavericks, like the mathematician Roger Penrose, suggest the answer might someday be found in quantum mechanics. But to my ear, this amounts to the feeling that quantum mechanics sure is weird, and consciousness sure is weird, so maybe quantum mechanics can explain consciousness.

And then there is the theory put forward by philosopher Colin McGinn that our vertigo when pondering the Hard Problem is itself a quirk of our brains. The brain is a product of evolution, and just as animal brains have their limitations, we have ours. Our brains can't hold a hundred numbers in memory, can't visualize seven-dimensional space and perhaps can't intuitively grasp why neural information processing observed from the outside should give rise to subjective experience on the inside. This is where I place my bet, though I admit that the theory could be demolished when an unborn genius--a Darwin or Einstein of consciousness--comes up with a flabbergasting new idea that suddenly makes it all clear to us.

I'll ask Karrde, given that his education in mathematics is far better than mine, to explain how mathematics has some problems that cannot be solved even in theory. The point is that science as a whole has some similar limitations. There are some questions it cannot answer, even in theory. Pinker's answer is that this is a fault of our brains; but perhaps someone may develop a better theory. Yet this too is subject to the limit that Dennett identifies.

What this means is -- barring some future Einstein who throws open windows that for now are closed to us -- what we have in the "Hard Problem" is a problem of metaphysics, not a problem of science. Metaphysics is in the realm of philosophy, which is an art rather than a science.

Metaphysics is the art of trying to guess the rules that lay behind the world. For example, given a world in which conscious people suffer terribly, inevitably decay and die -- well, what kind of a world is that? We can learn everything there is to know about how people suffer and decay and die, without knowing anything more about why the universe is set up that way.

A famous example of a metaphysical question is the status of the human fetus. Is it a person, or is it a clump of cells? There is finally no scientific way to decide. You can know a lot of scientific facts about it. You can know the moment when it can survive outside the womb, for example. You can know the point at which its genetic code is set. You can know the point at which it develops a brain.

None of those items of knowledge, though, do anything at all to answer the question, "Is it a person?" Finally, you just have to go with your gut.

Metaphysics is ultimately about judgment calls, which you make as much because they feel right for any other reason. This is where we return to the problem of "indoor philosophy." The philosophy that is all in the head uses only the rational part of the brain; metaphysics cannot be done there only. You need to feel as well as think to come to stable results.

Pinker's conclusion is that we should find the Easy Problem destructive to our idea of a soul; and that we should therefore rebuild our metaphysics based on his best guess about the Hard Problem.

Whatever the solutions to the Easy and Hard problems turn out to be, few scientists doubt that they will locate consciousness in the activity of the brain. For many nonscientists, this is a terrifying prospect. Not only does it strangle the hope that we might survive the death of our bodies, but it also seems to undermine the notion that we are free agents responsible for our choices--not just in this lifetime but also in a life to come. In his millennial essay "Sorry, but Your Soul Just Died," Tom Wolfe worried that when science has killed the soul, "the lurid carnival that will ensue may make the phrase 'the total eclipse of all values' seem tame."

MY OWN VIEW IS THAT THIS IS backward: the biology of consciousness offers a sounder basis for morality than the unprovable dogma of an immortal soul. It's not just that an understanding of the physiology of consciousness will reduce human suffering through new treatments for pain and depression. That understanding can also force us to recognize the interests of other beings--the core of morality.

He's entitled to that view, which I think is honestly delivered. He tells us cleanly where the lines are -- this is science, and that is just how I feel about it. Nothing wrong with that.

My own sense is different, and it is just as well informed. This is the one place where the old advertising line really works: "I'm not a doctor, but I play one on TV." That's all right. Playing one on TV imparts its own sense of things, which a real doctor would not have. This isn't a medical question. I'm not a neuroscientist, but I am a man.

My sense of things is that the brain and its activity isn't all there is; that it is as if we were studying a television set. You can study the television, and it will show you everything about how the picture is being formed on the screen. Every process involved is resident right there in the television. If you damage parts of the set, the reception blurs. The television still thinks its putting the image together correctly, but we can see it isn't -- just like a damaged brain can't quite get its information together, but can't tell that it is failing to do so.

Yet you can break that set with a hammer, and the signal is still there. You can't see it anymore -- without the set, have no way of sensing that it still exists -- but you can't stop the signal. That's my sense of the soul, and of what it means to die.

Eyesight works that way. The eye receives and the brain interprets light. The eye takes the light waves, converts them into electric signals that the brain can understand, and the brain projects them into a three-dimensional image of the world around you. It's fair to say that there may be seven dimensions instead of three, and our brain simply can't understand or interpret them.

What you can't do is get hung up on the eye and the brain, and forget that the light came from somewhere. If the eye shuts down, the light is still there. If the television set breaks down, the signal is still there. If the brain shuts down, the soul is still there.

That's an outdoor philosophy. I can't prove it, but I've felt the cold and seen death, and it seems right to me. I recognize that it's subject to McGinn's problem -- that it is a sense that may simply be a quirk of the brain. Well, it may be. But so, as the man himself says, may be any other explanation.

A scientist, who spends his life in rooms, may come to love the rational too much. A man has a rational and an irrational side to his soul. The scientist, focusing so much on the one, may come to see the other as a liability, a quality to be overcome with data and analysis.

So it may be, in scientific questions. I'm not against rationality, and I am eager to learn what new secrets science has to reveal.

But science has a place, and metaphysics another. Until and unless some future Einstein finds a way to transport these questions from the one realm to the other, we should approach them as whole men. That's a metaphysical position too -- a belief that the irrational part of us is valuable and vital, and something we should seek to involve in the most important questions of life.

I can't prove it, anymore than Pinker can prove the opposite. I invite the reader to follow Muir -- to camp rough in the high country -- to meet the brown bear of the forest -- and see if he still doubts it.

Perhaps it's only a trick of the brain that makes the man accept it. But perhaps that is the brain he was meant to have; perhaps that is the man he was meant to be.

Meant by whom? I don't know. But I have heard that a man can seek manifestations in the Sierra.